Want a Digital Marketing Job at a Startup? Better Learn to Code!

Originally posted on medium.com

Steve Jobs once said “Everyone should learn how to code, it teaches you how to think.”

Clearly, as true now as it was then and it will be in years to come. Coding is increasingly interfering into this digital world by spreading its DNA to literally everything we see and feel. Coding is gaining position among the top desired skills for all marketers at present. 

As anyone worth their salt will tell you, the future of marketing is digital. And anything digital, be it a website or an app or a social media analytics report, needs to be programmed — “coded,” as they say — in some form or another. Let’s face it, Jobs are becoming more interdisciplinary, especially in the digital sphere. As Douglas Rushkoff has rightly said “As I see it, code literacy is a requirement for participation in a digital world”.

All the way from data analytics, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, UX, customer experience and mobile marketing will one or the other way deal with snippets of codes. Marketing weapons such as landing pages, small project websites, html email template and big data analytics constantly dwells with codes and programming.

When it comes to digital marketing in startups, there are no fixed rules. Your mentors always seem to give you conflicting advice, and the books and blogs are so full of useful tidbits that it’s hard to know which things to prioritize. Sometimes you just find yourself staring into space wondering if you are working on the right things. Your level of autonomous will be at peak, so its a absolute necessity to have cross skills to successfully bring out creative solutions.

There are benefits to knowing how to code in addition to marketing skills will bring you a spotlight among startups:

• Firstly, you wont get scared to death when you see html and css during your attempt to make your webpage look nice.
• You are able to play around with your website’s layout, integrate analytics tracking codes, Popups, A/B test landing pages and html emails by yourself without the help of nerdy IT department. 
• You are able to communicate effectively with the development team or external web agency during a major update to your website. Efficiently drive them to create a user-friendly interface which could get you high conversion rate.
• You will be able to automate ad campaigns(Google Ad words) and save huge amount of time just by having knowledge of JavaScript.
• You develop a hybrid (Programming and marketing) mindset to work with unstructured data and the ability to make sense out of raw information.

On a final note, as digital marketers, learning how to code for the web should be for literacy and fluency in the startup world.  Not nice to have only. What is worth doing is worth doing well.  You are already competent or expert in digital marketing; why don’t you take a walk out of your comfort zone, and refresh your minds.

Let me know how useful coding is to your skill set and kindly share with friends and colleagues you believe can find it useful as well.